Issue 509

John Steel Singers The setting for my interview with Tim Morrissey and Scott Bromiley of Brisbane's John Steel Singers is a welcome change from the usual scenario of sitting by the phone. I meet them in the dB office, and suggest we go for a drink in the West End. The convival atmosphere lets us speak with the openness only enjoyed in pub conversations. Listening back, it is great to hear the interview sound much more like a regular conversation - I soon forgot about the presence of the voice recorder in front of us. I asked the pair about their recent tour, which encompassed more dates and more unconventional venues - Cronulla came in for a gentle ribbing - in anticipation of their new long-player, 'Tangalooma'. "Yeah, it's exciting - particularly the chance to play some places we've not played at before." The guys were here playing at HQ in support of Tame Impala, and I asked Morrissey about discernible differences between supporting spots and headline tours. "Well, we've actually had the chance to play quite a few shows of our own in Adelaide - the last couple of times at Jive. Adelaide is always a good show. The crowd here gets into it a lot more." I - jokingly - suggest that it's perhaps the general excitement of an actual band playing an Adelaide show that gets the audience excited, rather than any specific attraction. Bromiley relates an anecdote from his childhood days in Mackay when, at about 7 or 8 years of age, "Silverchair came through town. That was a big revelation. It was like, Silverchair, what are you doing here?" Morrissey agrees that both being from country towns originally gives them an acute awareness of these places, and they try to accommodate them on tour. "Yeah, definitely. Well, if they come to our shows. This is the first time we've done a lot more regional dates, so I'm really hoping that it does go well. I think that when we started, I was all 'let's do a lot of regionals', coming from a country town. But then, you know, you play your show in Coffs Harbour and you set up on the ground, and no one knows what's going on, and there's 2 people there. Those 2 people were probably already there anyway." It's an amusing story but one that reflects a sadder truth about the prospects of mid-sized Australian bands doing a full regional tour; as even though those shows offer a different sort of satisfaction and fulfillment for a band, such as the ability to experiment on stage and forge a more credible link with the audience, the logistics and numbers simply prevent them from occurring regularly. I present a scenario to the guys where they meet a stranger, introduce themselves, and are asked to explain the difference between their album 'Tangalooma' and their past relases. "We get to showcase different facets of our songwriting. On your EP and when you're trying to get somewhere, you might put your more poppy numbers forward, but the album offers more of a chance to include numbers you'd prefer... particularly with our first couple of EPs, which were really just trying to gain a foothold." Bromiley chimed in and added, "And consider that our EP and mini-album were written in our infancy as a band, and by the time we were writing the album, there was definitely more of a band-type process." 'Tangalooma' is, I'm told, an album unified by a theme. "We were sharing the same anxieties about life, death, you know. The idea of how death informs living is an idea we were interested in as well. Even some of the songs we'd written prior to that were addressing these themes without us even realising it... it's ('Tangalooma') loosely themed." Eventually, the ambient noise at the Worldsend proved too much, so we moved to the palatial grandeur of the Rosemont. There we continued, and I asked Morrisey and Bromiley about the band's now formidable web presence - check their currently pimped MySpace - and how that plays into the notion of striving for integrity and funcitonal independence. "That's one of the ways to reach out to people, I guess, and it's important to differentiate it somehow. But it feels weird to be in a band and going to label meetings (John Steel Singers recently signed with Dew Process) and be like, 'so when can we start writing music'? It's great having that label support to facilitate everything and look after the other things, but it can be strange." The John Steel Singers will launch their 'Tangalooma' album at the Ed Castle on Thu 9 Dec. The album is out now through Dew Process. By Mateo Szlapek-Sewillo